Prayer & Faith Resources

      
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      Reading The Bible
      The WORD Among Us

Reading The Bible

We use words to communicate, to think and to figure things out.
Words can inspire us, change us, challenge us and even hurt us.
What happens when God communicates? When God speaks to us? When God enters the human conversation?

This is called Revelation - God revealing himself to us throughout history.
God's word is The Bible.
 

Meditating on Sacred Scripture

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God invites us into a relationship with Him that is both personal and communal. He speaks to us through His Son, Jesus Christ, the Word-made-flesh. Prayer is our response to God who is already speaking or, better yet, revealing Himself to us. Therefore, prayer is not merely an exchange of words, but it engages the whole person in a relationship with God the Father, through the Son and in the Holy Spirit.


In Sacred Scripture, the Church constantly finds her nourishment and her strength, for she welcomes it, not as a human word, but as what it really is, the word of God. In the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet His children, and talks with them.  Catechism of the Catholic Church 104

Praying with The Bible

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lectio divina
Meditating on Sacred Scripture, especially the Gospels, is an important form of meditation. This spiritual reading is traditionally called lectio divina or
divine reading. Lectio divina is prayer over the Scriptures.

For the Daily Scripture Readings from Mass

How do we pray over the Sacred Scriptures?
  1. The first element of this type of prayer is reading (lectio): you take a short passage from The Bible, preferably a Gospel passage and read it carefully, perhaps three or more times. Let it really soak-in.

  2. The second element is mediation (meditatio). By using your imagination, enter into the Biblical scene in order to “see” the setting, the people and the unfolding action. It is through this mediation that you encounter the text and discover its meaning for your life.

  3. The next element is prayer (oratio) or your personal response to the text: asking for graces, offering praise or thanksgiving, seeking healing or forgiveness. In this prayerful engagement with the text, you open yourself up to the possibility of contemplation.

  4. Contemplation (contemplatio) is a gaze turned toward Christ and the things of God. By God's action of grace, you may be raised above meditation to a state of seeing or experiencing the text as mystery and reality. In contemplation, you come into an experiential contact with the One behind and beyond the text.
May every day of our lives thus be shaped by a renewed
encounter with Christ, the Word of the Father made flesh: He stands at the
beginning and the end, and “in Him all things hold together” (Col 1:17). Let us
be silent in order to hear the Lord’s word and to meditate upon it, so that by
the working of the Holy Spirit it may remain in our hearts and speak to us all
the days of our lives.   Pope Benedict XVI,     The Word of God